Worth Reading

How I stopped worrying and learned to love Armageddon

A lot of people live their lives in either hope, fear or hopeful fear of the end of the world. There are countless books and movies made on the subject and hundreds of homeless people in Las Vegas who seem to have a sixth sense about the coming of the end as well as some kick ass sandwich board making abilities. Admittedly, as a youth, I lived in terror of the end of it all, mostly due to being terrorized by religious people. I recall so many instances of having people tell me how the time was near that I became obsessed with trying to find out how long the end has been coming for. It turns out that the end has been coming since the very beginning, at least the beginning of recorded history as well as recorded myth. Just going to pop out a few little trinkets that have bugged me either past or present and review them, just to get it off my head.

First I have to go with the bible. Matthew 24 has these two little verses on says “and you will be hearing of wars and rumors of wars” and the other says ” For nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places”. Yeah, really? The first recorded war in the history of history was in the Middle East in 2700 B.C. so way before there was a bible, there were wars and rumors of wars and nations and kingdoms rising up and such. As for famine and earthquakes, China was tracking earthquakes around 1000 B.C. Famine has been around for a very long time as well, Let’s just go with an easy one. The famine after the fall of Rome, a whole lotta Romans died in that one baby. As for, “in various places” thanks for the specifics there pal, now we know where to look. Also, in Second Timothy 3: 1-5 there is a bunch of stuff about how a sign of the end will be the fact that people are becoming selfish dicks. I have bad news for Tim the Second, people have always been selfish dicks. That is why the Dodo is dead, the Celts lost their gold and why motha fuckin Noah didn’t let no motha fuckin dinosaurs on his motha fuckin plane, ark, whatever. There is also the coming of the Anti Christ who has been here before like a hundred times in different forms, the latest is of course Barrack Obama because we all knew the Anti-Christ would be black or at least a light caramel, unlike Jesus who had to be the christened one being the only blue eyed, milk skinned Jewish person in the whole of the ancient Middle East, he must have really stood out. Alas, since I could go on and on ad nauseum about the bible I will quit and move to other signs of the end.

A friend of mine was recently trying to tell me about the planet Nibiru or Planet X. Apparently it is supposed to hit the Earth soon, According to one web site we only have 140 days from the printing of this blog. Utter crap, I am not a super science, space physicist but I know enough to know that, if a planet was 140 days away, we could see that sumbitch. Look at it this way, we can look up and see Saturn, we can see it with our eyes! Saturn is about seven hundred ninety four million miles away from Earth. If there was a planet speeding at us, even from that distance, we would see it, if not with the naked eye, then a light use telescope. I have read that the reason we aren’t hearing about it is because NASA is not releasing the information and blocking out the area on Google Sky. That is stupid, if I insulted anyone by calling that stupid, good. There are thousands of amateur astronomers all over the world with access to the open sky; If there was something up there, you better believe that someone would find it and put it on the internet. Hell, if a celebrity forgets to wear panties on her big, drunk night on the strip, we see it in a matter of seconds. Do you really think a chunk of rock, hurtling toward the Earth to blow us all to Monkey Headed God’s secret poop land would go unnoticed? If so, here is a quick lesson; In 1609 Galileo began working on the three power telescope, made possible due to the innovation of Dutch lens crafter Zacharias Jansen (there is debate there but I don’t care about ancient lens litigation) Oh, the planet is coming in from the direction of the Sun; Another argument I have heard. Sorry, lots of cameras and filtered telescopes pointing at the Sun all day and night, no it doesn’t go out at night, it goes around. We saw Venus and mercury in between us and the Sun, we would see a secret planet too. Lastly, the planet Nibiru is affecting our weather, quakes, seas, etc. Phhhfffftttt! that was a raspberry for those folk. The Moon is ridiculously close to us and it makes some decent changes but planets like Mars and Venus, the closest planets to us, they barely give the Earth a tickle. Even when they are at their closest points, they have little or no effect on our planet. The very idea that a planet that we can’t see is changing our weather while moving at a higher speed than light if it is going to be here in 140 days, is just sad and silly.

Quick hits; The Mayan calender, nope, the Mayans didn’t see the big drought, the Spanish or the collapse of their trade routes coming, I doubt they saw the end of the world coming well over a thousand years later.

Solar flares; Magnetic field baby, so nope. maybe it will fuck your cell reception but no killy planet. However, if the idea of not getting a call or having to wait a bit longer to view your favorite stories is the end of the world to you, then the only way to reset your phone is to jump off a cliff, a high cliff; Don’t worry though, the solar flare angel will save you.

Flipping magnetic poles; It happens, get a coat and learn to hunt and gather if you are that worried. Oh, it happens really slowly also.

What about the prophecies of Nostradamus? Yes, he was a bright one. He did have a kind of foresight. He knew that if he rambled off enough bullshit that eventually something like some of it would somewhat happen sort of and it did kinda. Here let me try. In the next hundred years there will be great suffering in the West and a horse with an iron head will rise from the ocean and smite its enemies but another beast shall rise in the Pacific Northwest and smash the horses iron head with some sort of heavy thing that is slightly brass colored and the smelly folk will rejoice and not shave or bath for it is spoken. I guarantee that this will happen by the way. See it is really easy to guess what is going to happen if you never give a specific timeline, use vague directions like “out of the West” because everyone, each and every one of the seven billion plus people on this planet has a West of their very own. So if something happens to your East, it is happening in some other shlubs West.

Of course, we will all one day be dead, the planet will one day be devoured by the Sun and long before that any semblance of what we currently are will have either evolved into something different that we would probably not recognize as human. Anyone reading this in the year 2012 won’t have to worry about the eventuality of the human race as we know it disappearing, with the small exception of Timelords and Highlanders, either of which are very limited in number.

So don’t worry about so called prophecies and signs of the end. When you see people crazy enough to devote their short lives to standing outside of a movie theater or an adult book shop telling you to stop sinning, just shake your head, laugh and go watch your movie or buy your dirty books, hell buy them first in case the movie sucks.